65 Roses and a Trunki

Astronauts and Spaceships

What do you do when you face an obstacle? Do you accept the limit or defy it?

Genetics and neuroscience have proved that we are not born as ‘blank slates’. We bring into the world a greater or lesser tendency to be open, conscientious, agreeable, extroverted or emotionally stable. We are born healthy or with a genetic mutation that makes us sick. Our families will be rich or poor, living in peaceful or warring countries. We will have parental love to ourselves or have to share it with siblings and, as the psychologist John Bowlby claimed, every child has to answer the most fundamental question of all: is the world a safe place?

Random mutations and accidents of circumstance will, of course, create a world in which some things are easier to achieve than others. If your parents are doctors or lawyers, you are likely to have greater educational opportunity than if your parents are unemployed or in low-skilled jobs. If three nucleotides spanning positions 507 and 508 of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator on chromosome 7 are missing, then you will, like me and Kate, lack a single codon for the amino acid phenylalanine and your prognosis will be early death.

Clogged-up lungs, breathing difficulties and weakened immunity place limitations on my life. My attitude is to persist beyond anything reasonable in defying those limitations. As a child, I dreamed of being an astronaut until I found out that astronauts need strong, healthy lungs ...